Is it any of your business?
November 9, 2010 (Tuesday)
It doesn’t rain much in Las Vegas. The nearly 200 miles of storm sewer tunnels beneath the city are dry most of the time. That’s important to one thousand people who are homeless and live in those tunnels. After learning this, it will be hard for me to see a picture of the glitzy city with its miraculous display of colorful lights and its marvelous array of hotels and casinos, without thinking of the thousand people who live in the tunnels 20 feet below.
In Nevada, a very sparsely populated state, there are 14,000 homeless people. In the United States the number of homeless is 3.5 million (some say 7 million), and 300,000 of those are children.
Why is this so? Many are in this situation due to drug use or mental illness. Half the homeless are single mothers with children and people with minimal job skills. Twenty-two percent of those mothers left home because of domestic violence.
Aside from these kinds of problems, there is a basic situation faced by those living in poverty. Minimum wage was raised last year to $7.25 per hour. If a person works 40 hrs per week with no vacation, he cannot make enough money to pay for an apartment in a modern city. Besides that, many employers hire only part-time employees, limiting the work week to less than 40 hours, to avoid other payroll expenses that apply to full-time employees. Some people living in poverty have relatives who help them financially; others have no help from anyone. It’s simple math. They don’t make enough money to pay for housing.
This little blog can only scratch the surface of this horrendous subject. Here and there people and communities are doing what they can to help. Surely all of us can pray. In these bad economic times, the numbers of “less fortunate” people are growing.
When you read the Bible, look for what God says about the poor, and prepare yourself for a shock. He loves the poor, and wants believers to be compassionate toward them. There is much more in the Bible about that than we thought.